In an effort to drum up further developer support for its smartphone platform …

In an effort to drum up support for its smartphone platform among existing smartphone developers, Microsoft has released a raft of information to help iOS developers find their feet on Windows Phone 7. The information includes a guide to help iOS developers translate from iOS APIs to Windows Phone ones, a development guide specifically for iOS developers, and first-hand accounts on porting iPhone applications to Windows Phones.

One of the undisputed high points of Windows Phone is its developer experience. Together, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, Silverlight, and XNA provide a high quality toolchain and development environment—one that has seen Microsoft's faltering smartphone platform punch well above its weight when it comes to application support, boasting now of more than 15,000 applications. Later in the year, the Mango update will greatly expand the reach and capabilities of the SDK, enabling the development of a wide range of applications that can't yet be built.

However, it's Apple that currently has the biggest application store and most developer interest, and hence the most mobile developers with significant touch computing experience. Microsoft is keen to tap into that expertise, and making its platform as approachable as possible (given the radical differences in technology) is one way of doing that. The company also indicated that similar guides may be produced for developers on other platforms. Android has a thriving developer community, so it would be another obvious target. The large body of Symbian developers is also worthy of consideration, especially as Microsoft and Nokia both are already hoping that they will make the leap to Windows Phone.

So far, the company's efforts to court developers are seeing mixed success. Appcelerator's quarterly developer survey shows that iPhone and Android phones still have the clear lead, with 91 percent of developers "very interested" in developing for iPhone, and 85 percent for Android phones. Windows Phone is the "best of the rest," with Microsoft's platform edging ahead of RIM's BlackBerry, but it's a long way behind, with just 29 percent of developers giving the "very interested" response. This represents a 7 point drop compared to the previous quarter. The only reason that Microsoft took third place is that interest in BlackBerry phones dropped further still, by 11 points to 27 percent.

Appcelerator developers an HTML-and-JavaScript toolkit, Appcelerator Titanium, for developing phone and desktop applications. The survey respondents were all users of the phone oriented Titanium Mobile. This version currently targets iOS and Android, so Appcelerator users naturally have a bias towards those platforms. In spite of that bias, the survey still gives an indication of just what existing, experienced mobile developers feel about the different platform options available to them.

The main reasons cited for this lack of interest were that the platform is so far behind iOS and Android that it wouldn't catch up and that developers are already so busy with iOS and Android that they can't support another platform. Lesser reasons were concerns that the operating system is still emerging and that it doesn't offer much scope for making money—both attributable to its small market share.

Hurdles

Though the Mango update will not achieve absolute feature parity with iOS or Android, it will close the gap in many areas, and some portions, such as the Web browser, may even have the edge over the competition. The interest in Mango is tempered somewhat by Microsoft's continuing difficulties in getting updated software into users' hands; the new, richer SDK is only useful if the update is reliably and rapidly deployed. Developers need to be convinced that Microsoft's platform will catch up with the competition, and to do that Microsoft needs to make updates more frequent and more reliable.

The different development model of Windows Phone does incur certain time costs that other platforms avoid. Most notably, Windows Phone has no native SDK (programs can only be written in C# and Visual Basic .NET) and doesn't support the OpenGL ES 3D API. Although Microsoft's 3D API, XNA, is decent enough when considered in a vacuum (indeed, developers who have ported software have generally spoken highly of it), the fact is that it's easier to take an existing OpenGL ES program for iOS and port it to Android than it is to port it to Windows Phone. The Android port allows the bulk of the OpenGL ES code to be used as-is; the XNA code does not. Microsoft argues that its development tools are better and its development frameworks are easier to use than those of the competition—which may be true, but rewriting code still takes more time than not having to rewrite code.

One thing the company may be gambling on is that "not enough time" is a short-term complaint. If Windows Phone does indeed take second place, behind Android but ahead of iOS, as both IDC and Gartner have predicted, then developers will find a way to make the time; it will simply be too big to ignore. In the meantime, making things easier for other developers is the best the company can do.

The Appcelerator survey also gauged levels of interest in tablet platforms. iPad was, unsurprisingly, the leader. Interest in Android tablets was strong, but has fallen sharply since the previous survey, perhaps as a result of the decidedly mediocre reviews of the Xoom tablet, and more generally the Honeycomb Android version. Nonetheless, there are clearly synergies for both iOS and Android that Windows Phone lacks; iPhone development skills translate neatly into iPad development skills, and Android phone to Android tablet skills likewise.

Though it's almost certain that this will change when Redmond finally announces its plans for Windows 8, Windows on ARM, touch computing, and more, the current situation is that Windows Phone is something of a dead end; it's an API for phone applications, but it offers no ability to readily migrate to the richer—and potentially more lucrative—world of tablet applications. As compelling as the Windows Phone development environment is, it needs to be richer in functionality and broader in scope to really be on an equal footing with the competition. Mango will provide most of those functional riches, but the scope question remains a big unknown.